DEF: Ah finally heading back into the angst. But first, excuses. Um, well, last week Friday was my Grads, and fuck did I have fun! I met my crush from a few years back and we danced, I danced with my friend's crush and generally had the best time with my friends. So yeah, that's my excuse for this late chapter, and you know what? I'm not even sorry.
Rosella: Yeah her life. Let me see, oh congratulations to BeautifulRose for catching all the cameos, Assassin's Creed, Little Mermaid and Yu-Gi-Oh, kudos to you chick and thanks for the sweet review. Also to Ayena, happy coincidence and happy late birthday! DEF does not own any of the characters mentioned, blah.
Not many people realise it but it's the little things rather than big that start to bother you in the dead of night when you just can't get to sleep. When the air condition's on and just loud enough to keep you up, that point in the night when you're just too comfortable to move but not enough to drift off to sleep again. All of it snuck up on him on one of those nights, one of the growing number of nights Pippa stayed out later with her friends, one of the nights he's actually home before twelve and hoping to catch a movie with her.
He knows their slight estrangement is his fault, he has three jobs for fuck's sake, two to support them, pay the rent, buy food, little things like that while the third is because Pip is going to college in a month. Sure she might be going there on a scholarship but there are still things she'll need to buy, money he'll have to transfer to a separate bank account, one that she can access. God things like spare books, or shoes, clothes, sheets, pillows maybe, things for her dorm, food, every time he thinks about it he gets a headache.
Throwing one of the many blankets covering the couch over his shoulders, he blames it on the teenage girls that usually fall asleep there, he finds himself pacing through the apartment. Through the kitchen, through the living room and out onto the teeny, tiny porch surrounded by a brisk wind and it's cold, even for the dead of summer.
There are a lot of little things bothering him now, rent for one, bills for another but those are normal, no he's talking about the fact Hiccup's cousin knows about his job as a stripper. There's also the lovely fact Hic saw him down at the pier with Pitch, if that's not cause for panic, he doesn't know what is. Other than people he knows recognising him, there's the ever present threat of the paparazzi getting wind of Kozmotis Pitchiner's latest boy toy. He can see it all going to hell in a hand basket if that happens, there's no possible way he can hide who he is from them, they'll stalk him everywhere and unless he gets a new apartment, there's no way he can avoid them finding out where he lives.
He was stupid, so God damn stupid, thinking a different hair style and change of clothes could hide him from those who knew him. He knew it was only a matter of time before Pitch realised there was something wrong with the dancer he lusted after the man he saw on a bi-weekly basis, and he wasn't sure he ever wanted Pitch to make that connection. Their 'date', because there's no way he can get around calling it that now, was little less than a month ago, at the beginning of July, and they've already started August. Time's flying away from him, running away and he has no idea how to make it stop.
He's felt like this before, the creeping paranoia, the sudden shortness of breath and the fucking fatigue, he's been through this before, and just like last time, there isn't jack shit he can do about it. Last time it was the pressure of-of 'working' at Naughty or Nice, the clients there and the people he worked for, it sickened him, the things people would pay for and pay for gladly. However, he was just that much worse than them because he took their money just as happily as they were to shell it out, all for his sister, for his little sister who had no one else but him and he had to stay strong for.
He's pretty sure she never knew about him throwing up everything he ate less than an hour after he forced it all down, pretty sure she never guessed he suffered from ever present headaches because all the stress was just fucking getting to him. He was only eighteen, eighteen year olds shouldn't have to deal with this kind of pressure, however, he could only remind himself of thousands, maybe millions, of other innocent people that faced this every day, worse in fact and he would suck it up and move on.
His strategy had worked for about two years, two years of saving as much as he possibly could, of sleepless nights and chronic fatigue, of barely ever seeing his sister. The second year had been hell, and too much, he had been too stubborn, too damn stupid to realise what he was doing to himself until that point, just because the first few months had been something close to manageable, didn't mean he could make a living off of it. He had been pushing his body too hard for too long and when the shit hit the fan, he ended up in the hospital.
He had collapsed one night at the club, thank God he'd been at the club, and North nearly had a heart attack, one minute he's seemingly fine, next minute he's on the ground bleeding. Bleeding because he cracked his head open on the hard floor. He was in the hospital for a couple hours, the doctors ordered him to take it easy for a week or two, no strenuous activities, and pain killers. He hadn't listened to a word of it, but he had taken the pills, and it would have been far better if he'd just left those alone as well.
"Whoa, what are you still doing up?" The voice startled him, breaking his macabre train of thought and there was Pip, standing in her socks with a half empty bag of popcorn in her hands. He hadn't heard the front door open but he supposed this was a better position to be found in than pacing up and down.
Looking at her now, and he meant watching her as a young adult and not as his little sister Pip, he suddenly realised how very beautiful his sister was, how grown up and mature she'd become. The baby fat had melted away from her face, leaving only elegant angles and a straight, proud nose. She's taller, taller than he thought she'd get, still shorter than him but not by much, and her figure's filled out giving a narrow waist and soft curves.
Her mouth isn't quirked into that mischievous smirk anymore, it's a confident smile now, a soft, gentle smile, like his mother's but not quite, it's Pippa's, all hers. The brown eyes she got form their father aren't as round anymore, more almond shaped and her complexion has finally evened out, not a hint of the horrible acne she suffered through most of middle school and half of high school.
She's a woman, a pretty young woman that will be going away to college in less than two weeks, away from him, away from where he can see her and protect her. There's so much he hasn't told her that he should have but probably won't, because he can't bring himself to, can't face her knowing she knows. But, but what if someone tries something, what if she goes out somewhere and her drink gets spiked, what if she's walking to or from classes and someone tries something? She's going all the way to Arizona, nearly two thousand and two hundred miles away, that's a day and a half driving, four and a half hours on a plane! She's going so far away, away from him, what something happens to her? How can he get to her before he has a nervous break-down, how can he keep himself calm enough for that long?!
"Couldn't sleep, late nights getting to me, messing up my whole system," he complained airily, cutting his eyes back to the night sky, to all of the stars out there. Some twinkling, some shining, some just there but all sure of their life, sure of their purpose, he envies them.
"Oh, okay, well I brought popcorn if you want. The movie was alright, not as good as I hoped but not bad. Don't stay up too late, kay," Pippa advised, patting him on the shoulder and pressing the bag into his hands before disappearing back into the apartment. He stands there for what feels like hours, clouds travel across the sky, blotting out the stars, but that's alright, he doesn't really care for stars at the moment. He picks at the popcorn but, as usual, doesn't feel too hungry, he knows it's a mental thing, instilled since he was back in middle school. It's stupid, he knows it's stupid, but that doesn't mean he can fix himself after so long, it's just, he always get this...feeling that he can't eat.
Not that he shouldn't or wasn't allowed to but that he physically couldn't, it resulted in him forcing himself to eat but without much of an appetite. It's rare for him to actually want to, occasionally he gets ravenously hungry, devouring whatever he can get his hands on, making himself violently sick but at least it stops the gnawing, aching hunger in his stomach. He's been to a therapist about it before but neither one of them could figure it out, in the end the woman just got fed up of it all and told him straight up, eat because you have to and not because you want to, that's life kid, deal with it.
There's the sound of a door slamming shut, the bathroom door which needs to be slammed if it's going to shut, and another closing much more softly, his 'hours' have barely been minutes. When his gaze returns to the black skies, the moon has made its way into his vision and wispy little clouds were rolling in, the first quarter of the moon barely visible but there all the same. Usually he liked the ending and starting phases of the moon the best but why did this one have to look like a fucking know-it-all smirk?
He turned his back on the crescent, even white teeth clenched in equal parts confusion, desperation, jealousy and anger. He doesn't get any sleep that night and breaks his alarm clock when he throws it against the wall in the morning.
"Koz? I know you're still on London time but I need you to pay attention to me right now, understand?"
He blinked rapidly, fighting off the jet lag and his drooping eyelids to focus on the deep red blob in front of his face, ugh, he hated travelling, even if it was in first class, it was bloody annoying. The Brit sighed heavily and pushed him into the back seat where he barely managed to not fall on his face, he was very disoriented at the moment. More so when the car started moving, oh God, he swore he was going to throw up.
"You're worse off than I thought. Don't worry Koz, you'll be home in no time," Autumne promised pulling off too fast for his stomach and then he was dry heaving into a bag, lovely. He hated flying and he hated being sick, but more than anything, he hated flying while he was sick. Damnable flu, it would have to catch him just as he was getting ready to leave dreary old London for lovely, warm Pennsylvania. He'd been gone for a total of eight and a half days, eight and a half days of arguing up and down about actors and producers and this, that and the effable other. Casting had been horrible, the producer was one he'd worked with before but that didn't make the man any more tolerable, if anything, it made it worse.
Then there was the woman that had written the porno of a book, the one they were going to transform into a movie, because the world wasn't perverted and psychotic enough thanks. She had insisted they use every single line from the book, word for word because anything less would lose the essence of the story, something she had worked hard to convey to her audience. Oh yes, wouldn't just be a shame if they lost the phrase 'Inner Goddess' or perhaps couldn't focus on how much of a ditz the female protagonist was?
And of course there had been the start of casting, and hadn't that just been the most fun in his entire miserable life? He had no idea the human body could handle so much liposuction, Botox, plastic surgery, or silicone implants to be honest, the first batch to audition had been unreal. He honestly thought some of them were b-list porn stars, or maybe prostitutes, normal people don't audition in see-through scraps of gauze! Even Niel's outfit was more decent than that and he was a stripper. A. Stripper.
Oh and why, you ask, would the CEO of the company need to be involved with such inconsequential details? Because this was one of the highest budgeted and highly anticipated (dreaded in some cases), movie the company would churn out thus far. He needed to be there every step of the way, the only thing he wasn't doing was writing up the script and acting in the bloody thing himself. God, just the thought of acting in that thing his board wanted to call a movie had him heaving again.
He'd had a constant headache for the eight and a half days he'd been in London and a chronic need to smash his head into a desk, just to shut up his 'board of directors'. Spoilt, bratty children more like, on top of it all, he gets sick, fuck it all.
He'd called Autumne to pick him up because there was no way in hell he could catch a cab like this, he was not going to suffer through that on top of everything else. No, he'd much rather have Autumne fuss over him and maybe that was just what he needed, someone taking care of him for a bit. Never mind that she'd more than likely pour some horrible 'medicine' down his throat, the stuff would have been better marketed as horse piss than cold medicine. There was also the fact Vivian had taken Seraphina with her when she went to visit her parents for the rest of the month, which meant no little person running around the apartment to take his mind off his fever.
He coughed, more like hacked up part of his lung, and groaned, and on top of all this madness, he hadn't seen Niel in two weeks. Too caught up with the upcoming movie production to visit Seasons, although they had spoken occasionally, the man had given him a cell number and they'd talked a bit during his time in London. Apparently Niel had a sister that had graduated recently and was currently making plans to go to college in Arizona, a pretty far off college but he supposed it was the 'I'm-an-adult-now-and-I-can-take-care-of-myself-wa tch-me-prove-it-by-going-to-some-far-away-universi ty' thing most young adults got.
That had been a surprising bit of news though, he'd always pictured Niel as an only child, an estranged child at that, after all, no parent would be all right with their son being an exotic dancer. Then again, there were some parents out there who didn't give a rat's ass what their children did so long as it wasn't illegal, okay scratch that, didn't care so long as they didn't get called on to pay bail was more like it. He would like to think that wasn't the case but you could never tell, the world was a sad, screwed up place where a lot of dark and twisted things went unpunished and unnoticed.
That was another reason he didn't want to make this movie, it would be exposing a younger demographic to a few more hidden truths, and no he didn't mean sex. Sex was something every health, young person should have a firm grasp on, if you didn't know what sex was by the age of thirteen, then you were severely ill equipped to enter the world of adulthood. However, sex and fucking were two completely different things, one was a normal part of any individual's life, fucking was a perversion of that, something darker, dirtier, wrong. There was nothing wrong with those who liked a bit of pain in the bedroom, the ones that liked to be tied up and pounded into a mattress, rough sex was fun too. But, whatever the hell was going on in that book, was not safe BDSM, it was rape, plain and simple.
An abusive relationship romanticised by a naive, downright stupid young author. There were people that faced realities like that every single day, prostitutes that were beaten all but senseless by various johns, men and women that were so brainwashed into thinking what their partner did was right, they couldn't even begin to fathom any other way of living. The young people watching the movie might get the idea that 'Hey, this is way it's supposed to be', people were idiotic like that; anything that was in famous in local pop culture must be the right thing.
Oh great, headache's getting worse just thinking about that bit of garbage.
"Okay, out of the car, up we go Kozzy," Autumne instructed, grabbing hold of one upper arm and wrapping another around his waist, half leading, half dragging him to the elevator. Sometimes he forgot just how strong Autumne was, because for all that she was a proper British lady, she also kept in damn good shape.
"Remind me why I agreed to meeting in London for this monstrosity?" he groaned leaning back on the elevator wall, thankfully it was somewhere around midnight and not many people used the elevator then which was bleeding excellent because he didn't think he could handle seeing another human being just then. He'd probably vomit on them or he would if his stomach had anything left in it, he'd just about emptied it on the several hours spent on board the plane.
"Something about the sooner it's over, the sooner I can forget about it?" she suggested with a small smile, honestly, she did not fancy the pale face staring back at her. Okay, so the man was usually as white as death but this was different from his usual, more of a cream tinge, cream mixed with toothpaste that is, and there were a sheen of perspiration on his brow, definitely not good.
Koz normally had a pretty good immune system but when he did get sick, he got sick badly. The whole works too, fever, nausea, chills, loss of appetite, it wasn't safe to leave the man alone when he was sick, there was always the chance he might wander off the edge of his balcony. She really hoped this was like the last time she'd found him puking up his guts into the kitchen sink, that time the flu, or whatever it had been, had run its course in a matter of days. She could take the rest of the weekend off, nothing too pressing to deal with, but she'd have to head back in on Monday first thing and there wasn't really anyone else to watch over him.
"What am I going to do with you Kozzy?" she whispered worrying her lip, he gave her a bleary eyed glare but didn't say anything because as much as he had his pride he was also quite smart and knew when he was in over his head. She gazed at the sick man for a few seconds more before letting out a world weary sigh, oh whatever, she'd cross that bridge when she came it but until then, she had this lout to take care of.
"You're damn lucky to have me you know," she muttered poking his cheek, thin lips pursed and were on the verge of a scowl but fell slack mere seconds before it formed. He must really have it bad if he was too sick to scowl at her, shit.
"Humility suits you ever so well Aut," he deadpanned, she cocked an eyebrow at him but smiled.
"And sarcasm is one of your best qualities," she replied just as dryly, he shook his head but stopped quickly when the action made his vision swim. Dear God he hated being sick.
Pippa wasn't stupid, far from it actually if you really got down into it, and she wasn't the naive little girl that Jack thought she was either. She was old enough to know he hid things from her, to know he worked three jobs not two, she knew he had dyed his hair some obscure colour, not sure what it was yet only that he had, she even knew how much he liked Kozmotis Pitchiner. However, what she didn't know could still full entire books, starting with, what was his third job.
She knew it was something embarrassing, or shameful, maybe even mortifying, because what other reason would he have for keeping it such a tightly wrapped secret? Since they were children, Jack had shared everything with her, when he thought he might like boys just as much as he liked girls, she was the first person he told. She knew a lot of people might be ashamed, or even afraid of telling their younger siblings about their sexual orientation simply because of the thousand and one vices society had against them but Jack wasn't like that.
All he knew was that he couldn't work out his problem on his own but he wasn't ready to tell his parents so he turned to the one person he could always trust to keep a secret. She had kept his secret, even if she didn't completely understand why it was so bad, so what if her brother liked other boys, was something wrong with that? Eleven year olds aren't really against gays, not enough exposure to homophobic materials as yet, at least not her.
When he had his first kiss with a girl behind the locker rooms, someone named Rebecca from his acrobatics team, she was the first person he told. It had been a spontaneous thing, the both of them still pumped from their great practice and not thinking completely straight, nothing had come from it but still, he'd told her before any of his friends. He'd even told her about the time he'd tried tying his tooth to a door handle with a piece of string and epically failing to pull out the tooth. He slammed the door about five times and nothing but pain, walking down the stairs and tripping over his feet, however, made sure it came out when he landed face first one the dresser at the bottom.
The point was there weren't many secrets between the two of them, before and after their parents' death, however, there was omitted information, bits and pieces of things that kept her from seeing the bigger picture.
She knew that North had gotten Jack a job, one with a good enough pay that they could afford to move into an apartment instead of staying with Uncle Joey, who was a raging homophobe by the way. The arguments between him and Jack had been legendary, she doubted she would ever forget any of them, or the rude wake up call she got when they started. Before then she'd never known how prejudiced some people were against homosexuals, it was as though they viewed gays, lesbians and the rest as nothing more than animals, worse sometimes. Uncle Joey had never said anything to her, nothing at all, treated her the same way he had before, but she had still been glad to leave, even if it meant a smaller home on the other side of the city.
Whatever job North had gotten Jack, other than paying well, was one that only went on at night and was available to a person that had no form of tertiary education whatsoever. Once she had speculated drugs but knew Jack was smarter than that, if you ever got into drugs, there was no getting back out, period. However, the alternatives weren't exactly ideal either, she was hesitant to think weapons or sex but those were the only two left that someone could get out of relatively easy.
She didn't want to ever think Jack could traffic weapons, there was only one thing they would be used for and whatever people were killed by them, rapists, druggies, gangbangers, they were still people. People with a family and she sincerely doubted her brother would ever tear apart a family, he knew what that felt like, the sorrow and desperation that came with it, he wouldn't do that. And ding, ding, ding, here's our lucky winner, sex.
Now the internet was a beautiful, hideous thing, it could be used for good, evil, revenge, blackmail, education and a multitude of other things she didn't have the time to list. The internet could also be used to find places, thanks to such sites as Google Maps and it only took her hearing the name Naughty or Nice once or twice for her to get curious enough to look it up, it wasn't even that hard to find when she did. She really didn't want to think that her brother sold his body for money and for a while she even deluded herself into thinking he was just a bartender or something innocuous but reality always has its way of bitch slapping you in the face.
Her bitch slap had come in the way of a school service announcement, one of those lectures the government hosted warning students about the dangers of drugs, how easy it was for someone to slip something in your drink and about never knowing what they'd done to you once you came to. There had been a short movie, showing a dancer at a club that also worked as an escort and according to the narrator; escorts sometimes had it worse off than prostitutes. Escorts, or callgirls/boys, were usually linked to an agency; their agency would then help set them up with clients and later, take a percent of the total amount earned.
The agencies were supposed to ensure the escorts safety, however, there were still cases where the girls, or boys, were beaten within an inch of their life and when the police became involved, they weren't even able to drag down the agency with them as their contracts clearly stated any sexual favours were of their own free will. The front all agencies used was it was providing a service, that service being a date, someone to accompany you for the evening and nothing more, sex was alluded to but not stated out right thus avoiding any legal implications.
Truly all the agencies did was gave you better publicity, they added your pictures to their photo galleries and helped set up contacts you might not have gotten if you were working by yourself. Another plus of the agencies was if you got the shit beaten out of you, at least someone knew where you were supposed to be and would send help. Escorts that operated independently ran the risk of being possibly abused by a client and left there with no one knowing where they were.
After that, she'd done intensive research into the topic and been thoroughly disgusted and horrified by what she'd found. She knew Jack wouldn't get in as deep as some of the people she'd researched, but even that wasn't much of a reassurance because when all the niceties were stripped away and all the cards laid out on the table, it all came down to putting a price on your body. The very idea made her skin crawl but applying the idea to her brother?
However, the kicker was, she had never been sure just what Jack did at Naughty or Nice. He could just be a dancer, that was slightly less disturbing than him being an escort but without asking she would never know. The current question posed though, was whether or not he'd returned to be a dancer or something...more. And sometimes Pippa wished she wasn't a smart kid, that she was oblivious to the evils of the world like most girls her age. That all she was interested in was make-up and boys and clothes and college, that she didn't stay up wondering if tonight might be the night she gets a call from the police, or a hospital, because her brother's been hurt or arrested or worse.
But only sometimes, the rest of the time she tries to put it out of her mind, follow the little script she and her brother wrote long ago, where okay, they might not have their parents anymore but they had each other and they had to rely on each other. The script that stated Jack was the primary caregiver and breadwinner, she was the little sister that he was sending to school so she could make something of herself, and under no circumstances was she allowed to pry any further than the surface into how he got his money. So long as they stuck to their scripts, then everything would be fine, perfect, but, what happened when she left for college?
The script they had only applied for school and work, they had both learnt off their parts by heart, so much so that it had become their nature, no questions, no prying conversations because there are no secrets between us. What happened when she was nearly two thousand and two hundred miles away and Jack was left behind? Would he drop a job, would he pick up a new one, would he be able to adjust to the change in scene, would she?
"Hey Pip, are you staying home today?" It was surprisingly hard to answer that, this in between time had never been a part of the script either. Sure they'd spent summers together but never one like this, where she went out with her friends, where she bought things for her dorm, where Jack was barely there at all, be it day or night. All the summers before had been time off from school, time to laze around the house and stay up late, this one though, was a preparation, it was her getting ready for something more, something new.
And she couldn't even decide if she liked any of this but she couldn't exactly complain about it either because it would just bring up a whole other set of issues she didn't think she could ever work out with him.
"Uh, depends on whether or not Sophie's heading to the mall, why?" she asked brushing back her hair and opening her door, to find her 'brunet' brother in jeans and a tee shirt, weird. Today was his day off from Eb's, he usually lounged around the house in a pair of boxers and a vest, when he wasn't sleeping that was, in fact, it was strange to see him awake any time before noon and it was currently ten.
"Meeting with the guy I told you about. He's sick and his friend kinda asked me if I would watch him for a few of hours while she's at work. I'll be back around three for the latest," he added quickly though the explanation sounded off. And that was yet another thing she didn't know about dear brother Jack, this man he was dating, who was he, was he older, how had they met, what did he do and most importantly, why did Jack like him?
Of course she could never ask any of those things outright, there might not be any secrets between them but there was a sense of privacy. If Jack didn't want to say anything about it then it was for a damn good reason and it just wouldn't do for her to butt in, it would just put more strain on him. And how could she live with herself if she did that? He had already admitted to her that sometimes his happiness was just a show, how would she know if he was hiding it all for her sake or truly happy? Well, it was always best to err on the side of good, so she would just keep her trap shut and pretend everything was okay.
"Kays, Soph wasn't passing anytime before three anyway. Have fun with your sick bf and try not to catch his disease," she teased playfully, and fuck did the words sound hollow to her. He forced a smile before leaving, and if it felt as though she was letting him slip through her fingers, then it was alright because it was all part of the God damned script.
"Fuck the script and the playwright," she muttered before locking herself in her room, it was too early for all this life analysis shit.
DEF: I feel like such a bad person right now...and it's gone. As for all that stuff about escort agencies and callgirls/boys, I watched a documentary recently about them, as well as did intensive research of my own. Thank God for private browsing. The distances between Arizona and Pennsylvania, which I picked cause there's this place there with a Jack Frost road and ski resort, I got off a travel site so sorry if I'm off.
Rosella: We apologize in advance if any part of this chapter bothered anyone but this is the stuff that makes it real. We can't have it all fluff and romance, or sex and lust, there's got to be dirt and grime in there too. Also, can anyone guess which book Nightmare Productions is turning into a movie?